


Room 808

by mtgat



Category: Chase Me - Dreamcatcher (Music Video)
Genre: Characters Named After Band Members, F/F, Ghosts, Magic, Not RPF, Sex Magic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-28
Updated: 2017-05-28
Packaged: 2018-11-05 19:18:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,401
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11019858
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mtgat/pseuds/mtgat
Summary: There are many stories about what happened. None of them are true.





	Room 808

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Sumi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sumi/gifts).



> With deepest thanks to Morbane for the beta work!

The first thing you must understand is that nothing you've heard is true.

Ji never attempted to talk the rest of the girls into investigating the hotel. She wasn't the ringleader of some coven, holding the others in thrall to her own designs. I know that's what the stories said, after. The gossip papers wanted a salacious tale of young girls and their experimentations with lesbianism and witchcraft gone horribly awry. The kids from school wanted the other kids from school to think that each of them knew something secret, or had special insight into the tragedy, because tragedy at arms-end was still fame. The world wove lies around the girls and the hotel, invented outrageous fabrications: that they had drawn the names of their enemies on the walls with red lipstick or worse, that their bodies were found nude, that anyone brave enough to spend the night in the hotel would be murdered by their restless spirits.

The stories spread, and they faded into memory after the next scandal. The girls were forgotten except by their families and the few friends who knew the real story and the secrets, and who would never tell. All anyone knew was the old hotel was haunted, and after a while, no one cared.

Ghosts were superstitious nonsense from the old days. We lived in modern times with cellphones and midnight takeaway and Youtube. Who could blame the developer for buying the run-down hotel and fixing it up? Modern times meant modern money, made off quaint things from the past.

Guests wouldn't stay there. Conventions would book every room in the city except the ones at the old hotel, as though they couldn't see it, couldn't think about it. The new owners made sure the name and family-friendly rates were set up on every travel website, and still the bookings never came. Somehow people knew.

They heard Ji in their dreams, warning them to stay away.

Trust me. I know.

Ji was the oldest, a full year older than Bo who was the next oldest. Ji's family had moved four times when she'd been little, enough to hold her back from starting school an extra year. She was always taller, always louder, always in charge of the other girls merely by the accident of her birth year. At seventeen, even in her uniform she was easily mistakeable for an adult woman in her twenties, gorgeous and mysterious and unfortunately prone to attracting the attention of men on the street. Most just stared, but the worst propositioned her with promises or money as she hurried her steps.

Later they said she hated all men, but that wasn't true. She hated the men who looked at her that way, who made her feel soiled when she'd just bathed. But that was different, I'm sure you'll agree.

Ga-hyeon was the youngest of their group, barely fifteen when it happened. Where Ji was tall and full-bosomed, Ga-hyeon looked tiny in comparison, still more a child than a woman, pale and quiet. In another time and place, they'd have been natural foes, competing from opposite ends of the pile over the attentions of some boy. In this world, each saw in the other everything she herself was not, and the captivating difference meant love. They held hands and exchanged blushing kisses, and their friends laughed and teased the lovebirds in the kindest humor.

Seven was a hard number, with the little wars and internal truces that always arise. Someone was always left out, or pushed in where she didn't fit. Eight would have been better. Eight was lucky. Eight would have changed everything. Seven meant two might wander alone into the quiet corners of the school that everyone thought they were the first to discover, running fingers through soft hair or a bold hand up between thighs under a skirt, while the other five were left to do their school work, or argue, and because four was easier than five, one walked home from school alone.

Yoo-hyeon wasn't the tallest nor the smallest nor the smartest, but she was their friend. A wound to one was the same wound to seven. It could have been far, far worse, if Bo and Si-yeon hadn't found her when they did and frightened the boys away. Yoo-hyeon's uniform was dirty and she was scared, and that was all, but it was enough.

They took her to Bo's house, where Ji and Ga-hyeon joined them. Bo washed Yoo-hyeon's uniform while Hadong and Dami cuddled with her to either side until she stopped shaking. "I hate them," she said, but her words were for Ji. "I hate the way they look at me. I hate the words they call me."

"I know," Ji said, sitting on the edge of the bed and taking Yoo-hyeon's hand.

Ga-hyeon stood by the window, looking through the thin curtain out into the scraping of blue sky she could see far above. "We have to stop them once and for all," she said. "We have to stop them from hurting us, from hurting anybody."

"We can't kill them," Si-yeon said.

"No. But we can bind them."

It started there. Magic wasn't something to be undertaken by the silly-minded or the greedy. It was a tool, and that day the seven girls began work on studying that tool. They were excellent students at everything they put their minds to. This was no different. Ley lines. Mirror spirits. Candles. They practiced in pairs and together. Did Ji and Ga-hyeon find an old book that told them the means of harnessing their intimate touches into a source of energy, or did they discover the secret for themselves, with nimble fingers and delicate tongues wrenching pleasure and power from each other? Does it matter now how they learned?

The hotel sits on the crisscross of ley lines, like a light-up toy with a plug. It was the natural choice for their work, the night they were ready. Between owners again, it lay empty. Just as it stands today, the dark-paneled building didn't loom like a ruin ought to, forbidding and dusty, but instead loomed in anticipation, waiting for the guests to arrive.

Room 808 squatted over the intersection of the strongest lines of power. That's where they went, with the candles and the flowers, nodding to each other with the words they'd learned. Bind the men from doing harm. Reflect their terrible urges back onto themselves. Surround the girls themselves in safety forever, a circle of protection drawn across them and down each body as mouths nuzzled between legs to find the perfect peak of magic, cast out and up into the night.

The police report said the candles they used were soaked in impurities, some poison they'd bathed the wicks in to bring on trances, instead choking them as they performed their desperate ritual. Seven girls playing with contaminated candles died by accident. It was a miracle they didn't start a fire and burn down half the city. Case closed.

The truth is nothing like the police report.

The truth is, magic has a price, and protection has the highest price of all. They set out to make themselves safe, make the world safe. They learned safety cannot be found in this world, only in the next.

Walking into the next world alone is frightening, which is why at the moment of the spells' completion, they chose to walk hand-in-hand with their closest friends.

Ghosts are safe.

They remain in the hotel, wandering the halls, returning to the room where they died. Some visitors come seeking answers or mysteries, looking for titillation or for evidence of life after death, for more knowledge than the cellphones and Youtube can offer. Magic and ghosts are old-fashioned nonsense, making them all the more enticing.

The girls don't like visitors. I warn away as many as I can. Not everyone listens to me.

A man came with a camera, dreaming of catching them. He sweated his dreams into his pillow, wanting them, just like all the others. But they have traveled where no one can hurt them. He chased them, and they chased him away. They always chase away intruders.

They are together. They are safe. They are happy. This is their home. Do not seek them in this room. Whatever you have heard, whatever story you believe, there is nothing for you here.

Now go.


End file.
